Portable computer printers are well known in the prior art and include dot-matrix printers, piezo-electric ink jet printers, laser printers and thermal ink jet printers. When using handheld printers the printing surface is not fed through the printer, but rather the handheld printer is placed on a printing surface. On many handheld printers, printing is accomplished by way of a print head being applied to a desired printing surface. The handheld printer is generally aligned with the printing surface in a fashion so that the image may be linearly printed across the surface. The print head is then initiated to begin printing the desired image onto the printing surface.
It will be appreciated that in order for the handheld printer to optimally perform, the print head must be maintained in such a way that it will be clean prior to each use. Furthermore, it will be appreciated that the print head needs to be capped and protected between uses of the handheld printer. However, conventional methods for manually capping and cleaning the print head do not ensure that a user will properly maintain the print head. A user may forget to cap the print head when the printer is not in use. A user may also fail to wipe the print head clean before using the handheld printer. Even if the user does clean the print head, it may be done in an unsatisfactory manner resulting in damage to or misalignment of the print head.
Therefore, what is needed are methods and apparatuses for automatically capping the print head when a handheld printer is not in use and forcing the user to uncap and safely wipe the print head before using the handheld printer.